dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
They lived by hunting and by growing corn and squash.
In your reply, you focused on hunting but what about "growing corn and squash"?
Busy? Yes. But exciting? In what galaxy could you say growing corn and squash is exciting? That's a resounding no, to me. That significantly downgrades B as an answer, IMO.
What this is though, is productive. (We even call it "produce" in stores)
Some of these things sound dull or dreary, but I'm just not seeing how you can call doing all of these things dull and dreary. Beautiful pottery? Fine sashes? Turquoise jewelry? The picture the author is painting does not really communicate dull and dreary to me. I can see how they might be painstaking and hard, but they're still describing fashionable and pretty things. "Dull" is very much downgraded as a choice to me. What about hunting? Really hard to think dull and dreary here as well.
What all of these things have in best common is they involve producing. Fine jewelry, container chotchkas, or hunting or growing food to eat.
You are productive when you pour a sack of polyethylene pellets into the hopper of your injection molding machine and produce a thousand water bottles an hour. You are unproductive when you spend a week or two weaving a basket so tightly that it just about holds water.
Sure, but "they continued this way until 1200 AD". That should put you in an old timey frame of reference. I don't know much about the time before 1200 AD but I bet baskets that hold water would be hella clutch.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
Then again, I don't think that solving this sort of complex problem with a timer over your head is empathetic or reasonable. In reality, when I come across a system constraint I have to engineer around, I at least have hours (if not days). My gut feeling was that many people failed because of the pressure and nerve aspect as opposed to the ability to solve the problem in a reasonable timeframe.
I've been doing hiring off and on for about 20 years so I feel confident offering two quick thoughts.
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Have you done mock interviews with the rest of the team to try these questions out? How do your own people do?
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Is failing to complete the problem in time that big a deal? In general I find the journey of problem solving more important than reaching the end in the allotted time. You usually know after an hour if someone is too much of a dick to work with, or if they could finish if you gave them another 15 minutes. OTOH, if you and the candidate spend an entire hour struggling with what you thought would take ten minutes, that's probably bad.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
We have 4 children. They're all smart, but my middle son has tested as > 99.9% in math and taught himself to read somewhere between ages 3 and 4. Despite being in one of the more affluent districts in our state in the Northeast there are no services for gifted children. As long as children are performing at grade level asking for more academic rigor is met with shrugs. This is partially why we're homeschooling now.
One of my kids is like this. He taught himself to read at age 5 and he's about 3 grades ahead in math ability. He's supposed to start first grade in the fall but we're homeschooling him instead because, among other things, the public schools have no resources for gifted kids. We're in the PNW and not the Northeast. I'd try a private school here but they're all either religious or some woo woo hippie shit.
(I also think he'd go through a misanthrope period if he was forced to hang out with kids that much slower than him, like I did)
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
... switch out the variable names? E.g. "Every time the server reboots, it has to pull down a 450MB file over a 30MBPS connection before it can start serving requests. The server drops any requests that come in before it finishes booting. Assuming the system gets 3 requests per second, how many requests are dropped every time the server reboots?"
Okay I needed to write this one down, but only because you said megabits.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
I can't really say. I've changed industries a few times the last 20 years. It certainly seems like more people are replying to job openings now. Like hundreds at a time. 2 years ago it would be tens. I don't have a read yet if the quality is higher though. E.g. a lot of these numbers could be blown up from layoffs, and the laid off people are probably not the cream of the crop.
How many UK politicians do you think can get the right answer?
52%, sample size of 101
That's actually so much better than I was expecting. Whew.
But broadly you're right. Talent is rarest resource in the universe and you can't make people smarter. But you only need one Newton or Haber to advance the frontier.
The frontier advancement is obviously important stuff, but still, having worked in orgs full of, say, approx 140+ IQ people and orgs that must be approx 115 IQ people, I can tell you the former is insanely productive and refreshing and the latter is almost oppressive and gets mired in stupid shit. I can't help but extrapolate to all of society and think how much harder better faster stronger the rest of the world would be if we brought the average up.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
That suggests one approach might be to try to get a large group of IQ>130 people together in one location for the purposes of advancing the state of knowledge of the universe, maybe in a small city that is specifically focused on supporting those people. Since it's a city dedicated to the study of the universe, I propose calling it a "universe city".
Sounds sexy af.
How many motteizeans played sports?
Awhile ago there was a thread here, or perhaps on /r/themotte, where a parent observed that their smart kids were a lot more prosocial and did a lot more sportsy things than they did when they were kids and other parents chimed in and observed this as well. Just all around sports, social activity, video games and also good grades and deep nerd shit in their cohorts.
(I pretty much suck at sports myself though)
If you're a smart person, how do you find this work that needs doing? I consider myself a smart person. I inevitably find myself working for companies where I do tons of work that it only a really smart person could do, but that work is ultimately pretty meaningless and has little impact on society.
...
Give me something meaningful to do, where I really can make an impact. I'd love to do it. But everyone tells you they're working on meaningful stuff, and it always ends up being the same operational crap.
Your first instinct is probably to run screaming from these meaningful environments because, besides the principal investigators or chief scientist being big swinging dicks and fairly competent most of the team is mid, the bureaucracy is soul crushing, or both.
Aside from academic labs or pharma departments doing meaningful work, there are many startups out there that have the same form. Started by a few scientists writing Python, they got funded, and now they're trying to scale their operation and it's a fucking nightmare between bad platforms and bad dependency management and spaghetti code bases and otherwise mid dev teams. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to come in and shine it up while also fighting intense resistance to change. Also they're paying low six figures at best and there's 10+ meetings a week.
A few more OOMs of smart people would help a lot.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
and sometimes athletically talented at least as much as they want them to be smart
A very large fraction of public is in denial of genes having substantial effect on intelligence with few exceptions.
Interestingly, another point Murray makes in Real Education is that IQ and other talents appear correlated. Despite the dumb football player stereotype, or the nerd who trips over their own feet stereotype, in the aggregate people with high athletic skill also have higher IQs.
I'm posting this in Small-Scale because I don't want to get too weighty on this, but rather commiserate with other smart people about how difficult it is to appreciate how not smart the rest of the world is. Or at least convince you that it's freaking ugly out there.
A little bit of background first.
I consider myself retarded and slow and like I make lots of easy stupid mistakes. My brain feels really noisy and like I would regularly kill people if I worked in an ER or intensive care because I'd mis-dose them or get confused about what step in what procedure we're following. (Though some of these are probably ADHD issues, which a psychiatrist agreed enough with to write me an Rx for, as an Adderall-seeking adult)
I found myself becoming a misanthrope in public school because I considered it extremely, absurdly slow and boring and my school didn't appear to care. I'm sure I didn't make it easy for them because I found everything so trivial that I wouldn't do the work. I also thought most of my teachers were slackers who just wanted an easy job and didn't look up to them in any way (though there were some diamonds in the rough) and perhaps my contempt came across my facial expressions. I started cutting classes to hang out in the computer lab and write OpenGL programs. I can see how few if any teachers wanted to take a risk and advocate for me or would even imagine I was bored to tears intellectually. I also had no friends in HS, not even other supposedly smart kids. I'm not autistic by any means. Everyone just seemed... off. And also my carefully cultivated set of friends on IRC were so much better.
I was so disgusted with school and other people that I never went to college. The thought of taking any step in that direction was a hard no, I was desperate to get out into the work force and got a computer job when I was 18 and didn't think much about intelligence, for awhile.
I've slowly, eventually come to terms with the fact that I have a fairly big cognitive edge over most people. I don't mean this with a sense of pride. I mean this in a sense of horror.
One thing that's confused me a lot is that over the last decade or two, "verbal IQ" has gone up considerably. In the olden days it seemed like people on the internet were either smart or they were obvious morons because the obvious morons couldn't write, being new to keyboards and chatting. But nowadays even the most dimwitted Redditor writes English fluently and they'll even use words from the scientific and intellectual classes to argue, so I would spend a long time arguing with people who were just never going to understand me. Like man-years, I'm sure.
Anyway, it was still really hard to realize I have a cognitive edge? Charles Murray argues in Real Education that many smarter people don't realize just how smart they are, due to sorting. They seek out other smart people and compare themselves and see that they have minor relative strengths and weaknesses and conclude the differences between them, and thereby everyone actually, are cases of nurture and not nature. Meanwhile the people who can't do basic arithmetic in their heads or who could never handle a hypothetical conditional don't enter your universe, or you probably sense you're not very alike and don't get to know their intellectual life.
A few things have broken me out of this. In the Parable of the Talents, Scott writes:
I work with psychiatric patients who tend to have cognitive difficulties. Starting out in the Detroit ghetto doesn’t do them any favors, and then they get conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia that actively lower IQ for poorly understood neurological reasons.
The standard psychiatric evaluation includes an assessment of cognitive ability; the one I use is a quick test with three questions. The questions are – “What is 100 minus 7?”, “What do an apple and an orange have in common?”, and “Remember these three words for one minute, then repeat them back to me: house, blue, and tulip”.
There are a lot of people – and I don’t mean floridly psychotic people who don’t know their own name, I mean ordinary reasonable people just like you and me – who can’t answer these questions. And we know why they can’t answer these questions, and it is pretty darned biological.
Disturbing.
Did you see the conditional hypotheticals thing? Scott again, quoting the anonymous IQ researcher posting to 4chan this time (so grain of salt)
I did IQ research as a grad student, and it involved a lot of this stuff. Did you know that most people (95% with less than 90 IQ) can't understand conditional hypotheticals? For example, "How would you have felt yesterday evening if you hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch?" "What do you mean? I did eat breakfast and lunch." "Yes, but if you had not, how would you have felt?" "Why are you saying that I didn't eat breakfast? I just told you that did." "Imagine that you hadn't eaten it, though. How would you have felt?" "I don't understand the question." It's really fascinating [...]
Other interesting phenomenon around IQ involves recursion. For example: "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." Most literate people can manage this, especially once you give them an example. "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue. In this story, one of the characters must be describing a story with at least two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." If you have less than 90 IQ, this second exercise is basically completely impossible. Add a third level ('frame') to the story, and even IQ 100's start to get mixed up with the names and who's talking. Turns out Scheherazade was an IQ test!
Time is practically impossible to understand for sub 80s. They exist only in the present, can barely reflect on the past and can't plan for the future at all. Sub 90s struggle with anachronism too. For example, I remember the 80-85s stumbling on logic problems that involved common sense anachronism stuff. For instance: "Why do you think that military strategists in WWII didn't use laptop computers to help develop their strategies?" "I guess they didn't want to get hacked by Nazis". Admittedly you could argue that this is a history knowledge question, not quite a logic sequencing question, but you get the idea. Sequencing is super hard for them to track, but most 100+ have no problem with it, although I imagine that a movie like Memento strains them a little. Recursion was definitely the killer though. Recursive thinking and recursive knowledge seems genuinely hard for people of even average intelligence.
I tried the "didn't eat breakfast" thing on a few people I know. All of the adults got it (whew). It's very interesting to try it on kids. Kids five and under can't do it flat out, but at about 6+ they can. Imagining that some people are forever 5 years old in that part of their brain is freaking wild.
Swiveling back to Murray in Real Education, he tries to convince you of how not smart the average person is by showing a series of fairly trivial 8th grade exam questions and detailing how wrong most kids get them.
The Anasazi made beautiful pottery, turquoise jewelry, fine sashes of woven hair, and baskets woven tightly enough to hold water. They lived by hunting and by growing corn and squash. Their way of life went on peacefully for several hundred years. Then around 1200 AD something strange happened, for which the reasons are not quite clear.
Here is the item:
Example 7. The Anasazi's life before 1200 AD was portrayed by the author as being
(A) dangerous and warlike (B) busy and exciting (C) difficult and dreary (D) productive and peaceful
The answer is
55% of Illinois 8th graders get this wrong.
I've posted a few of these to Twitter. Some are mathy, and some are word problems. This one about the Asanazi drives some people berserk; people apparently can't separate the author's portrayal from their own portrayal, or do the basic constraint logic needed to rule the rest out.
I saw someone joke in a different part of Twitter that stuff like LSAT questions are designed to maximize toxic Twitter engagement and I have to concur.
Last one. Scott again, writes recently.
According to tests, fewer than 10% of Americans retain PIIAC-defined “basic numeracy skills”, even though in theory you need to know algebra to graduate from most public schools.
I don't really know what this PIIAC thing is, so I asked ChatGPT4o to generate an example question that demonstrate proficiency.
You are planning a trip and need to budget for fuel costs. Your car’s fuel efficiency is 30 miles per gallon, and the distance to your destination is 450 miles. If the price of gasoline is $3 per gallon, how much will you spend on gasoline for the trip?
IMO you should be able to do this in your head in a few seconds. It feels embarrassing to even talk about something this easy and connect any hint of pride to it, like this is an example of any cognitive edge at all. Yet huge portions of the population will struggle with it. I asked an 11th grader taking AP classes this question and they said they would need pen and paper to figure it out(!) He at least knew how to organize it in terms of x.
I could see a grand majority of the population never writing it in terms of x = ... and solving that way.
I'm trying to fill a position at work right now. A sys admin role. I want to ask that gas mileage question during technical interviews but I'm afraid the people who will get it right will be so insulted that they can't believe I'm asking this, while the people who get it wrong will feel very unfairly brutally discriminated against because I could pop such an irrelevant-to-their-job question on them.
So. How do we expect to become a Star Trek, space faring civilization again? There's so much work to do that we need smart people for and so few smart people.
We know how to avoid being overwhelmed by 65 IQ adults. In childhood you can ensure they don't suffer the worst poverty and go hungry and give them a K-6 education. Then they'll have 80-90 IQ. That's still grim, but a huge accomplishment.
Ignoring the Flynn effect, do we have any idea at all about how to shift, say, the middle of the curve from 100 IQ to 130 IQ? Is there any therapy or drug or surgery anywhere on the horizon that could achieve this?
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
Not just the military! You can buy an EMP shield for your home emergency generator.
Also a tin-foil, er, I mean EMF blackout hat.
People here don't buy guns or gun accessories that the Biden administration is trying to use administrative procedure to make retroactively illegal?
Hold up. What's the specific claim? I'm not a huge guns guy but I do remember having to submit to a background check for both a rifle and a handgun. Additionally, I understand if I purchase a suppressor this requires multiple submittals to various agencies. I fully understand and don't really... worry... that they know all about my gun life? What impact is a consumer VPN service or switching to Signal going to have on any of this? What does the FBI scanning bank records have to do with this?
Could they have? According to LawyerGPT
Lack of Criminal Authority: The FEC does not have the authority to prosecute criminal violations. When potential criminal conduct is identified, the FEC refers such cases to the Department of Justice (DOJ) or relevant U.S. Attorney's Offices for criminal investigation and prosecution.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
I am arguing that the judge is a layer of the due process system and that the plea bargain has to at least make sense to them.
If you submit a plea bargain that says I confess to the crime of wearing a red shirt in public, under a DMV statute 23.1, and the punishment for this is death, a justice of the Southern District Court of New York isn't to just go "hurr durr looks good to me".
I am asking to what degree do you think a judge would scrutinize Cohen's plea bargain? I could imagine the judge reading "he's pleading guilty to making a hush money payment to a mistress, as an undisclosed campaign finance violation. does that make sense? well, his client was running for office and she was threatening to go public with their affair. seems like it passes the smell test, campaign finance violation? sure why not"
I could also imagine a judge saying "wtf this would make any action taken by someone spending to improve their public perception a campaign finance violation. sounds nuts. what a bad precedent to set. I'm throwing this part of the plea agreement out. or at least asking the prosecutor to explain their thinking on this"
I fully believe as a member of the justice system, the judge could do the second and from time to time they do. I'm asking you to explain why you think the second thing didn't happen. Because the judge hated Trump? Because he just uncritically accepted it? What?
In your SVU example you're talking about the prosecutor presenting a different set of facts to the judge that have little to do with what happened in reality.
But in this Trump case, however, the claim is that the facts in the plea bargain itself should exonerate him by a simple reading of the law and realizing that a hush money payment to a mistress is not a campaign finance law violation.
This did not, however, happen. The judge accepted it. If charging him with an FEC violation was so inappropriate surely the judge would jump in and say "that's cute guys, but failing to classify hush money payments to a mistress doesn't violate the Federal Election Campaign Act". The judge can't even be trusted to read the entire document and while only considering that document say if it does or does not compute?
Campaign Finance Violations
The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, as amended, Title 52, United States Code, Section 30101, et seq., (the “Election Act”), regulates the influence of money on politics. At all relevant times, the Election Act set certain limitations and prohibitions, among them: (a) individual contributions to any presidential candidate, including expenditures coordinated with a candidate or his political committee, were limited to $2,700 per election, and presidential candidates and their committees were prohibited from accepting contributions from individuals in excess of this limit; and (b) Corporations were prohibited from making contributions directly to presidential candidates, including expenditures coordinated with candidates or their committees, and candidates were prohibited from accepting corporate contributions.
On June 16, 2015, Individual-1 began his presidential campaign. While COHEN continued to work at the Company and did not have a formal title with the campaign, he had a campaign email address and, at various times, advised the campaign, including on matters of interest to the press, and made televised and media appearances on behalf of the campaign.
In August 2015, the Chairman and Chief Executive of Corporation-1, a media company that owns, among other things, a popular tabloid magazine (“Chairman-1” and “Magazine-1,” respectively”), in coordination with COHEN and one or more members of the campaign, offered to help deal with negative stories about Individual-1’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided. Chairman-1 agreed to keep COHEN apprised of any such negative stories.
Consistent with the agreement described above, Corporation-1 advised COHEN of negative stories during the course of the campaign, and COHEN, with the assistance of Corporation-1, was able to arrange for the purchase of two stories so as to suppress them and prevent them from influencing the election.
First, in June 2016, a model and actress (“Woman-1”) began attempting to sell her story of her alleged extramarital affair with Individual-1 that had taken place in 2006 and 2007, knowing the story would be of considerable value because of the election. Woman-1 retained an attorney (“Attorney-1”), who in turn contacted the editor-in-chief of Magazine-1 (“Editor-1”), and offered to sell Woman-1’s story to Magazine-1. Chairman-1 and Editor-1 informed COHEN of the story. At COHEN’s urging and subject to COHEN’s promise that Corporation-1 would be reimbursed, Editor-1 ultimately began negotiating for the purchase of the story.
On August 5, 2016, Corporation-1 entered into an agreement with Woman-1 to acquire her “limited life rights” to the story of her relationship with “any then-married man,” in exchange for $150,000 and a commitment to feature her on two magazine covers and publish more than 100 magazine articles authored by her. Despite the cover and article features to the agreement, its principal purpose, as understood by those involved, including COHEN, was to suppress Woman-1’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.
Between late August 2016 and September 2016, COHEN agreed with Chairman-1 to assign the rights to the non-disclosure portion of Corporation-1’s agreement with Woman-1 to COHEN for $125,000. COHEN incorporated a shell entity called “Resolution Consultants LLC” for use in the transaction. Both Chairman-1 and COHEN ultimately signed the agreement, and a consultant for Corporation-1, using his own shell entity, provided COHEN with an invoice for the payment of $125,000. However, in early October 2016, after the assignment agreement was signed but before COHEN had paid the $125,000, Chairman-1 contacted COHEN and told him, in substance, that the deal was off and that COHEN should tear up the assignment agreement.
Second, on October 8, 2016, an agent for an adult film actress (“Woman-2”) informed Editor-1 that Woman-2 was willing to make public statements and confirm on the record her alleged past affair with Individual-1. Chairman-1 and Editor-1 then contacted COHEN and put him in touch with Attorney-1, who was also representing Woman-2. Over the course of the next few days, COHEN negotiated a $130,000 agreement with Attorney-1 to himself purchase Woman-2’s silence, and received a signed confidential settlement agreement and a separate side letter agreement from Attorney-1.
COHEN did not immediately execute the agreement, nor did he pay Woman-2. On the evening of October 25, 2016, with no deal with Woman-2 finalized, Attorney-1 told Editor-1 that Woman-2 was close to completing a deal with another outlet to make her story public. Editor-1, in turn, texted COHEN that “[w]e have to coordinate something on the matter [Attorney-1 is] calling you about or it could look awfully bad for everyone.” Chairman-1 and Editor-1 then called COHEN through an encrypted telephone application. COHEN agreed to make the payment, and then called Attorney-1 to finalize the deal.
The next day, on October 26, 2016, COHEN emailed an incorporating service to obtain the corporate formation documents for another shell corporation, Essential Consultants LLC, which COHEN had incorporated a few days prior. Later that afternoon, COHEN drew down $131,000 from the fraudulently obtained HELOC and requested that it be deposited into a bank account COHEN had just opened in the name of Essential Consultants. The next morning, on October 27, 2016, COHEN went to Bank-3 and wired approximately $130,000 from Essential Consultants to Attorney-1. On the bank form to complete the wire, COHEN falsely indicated that the “purpose of wire being sent” was “retainer.” On November 1, 2016, COHEN received from Attorney-1 copies of the final, signed confidential settlement agreement and side letter agreement.
COHEN caused and made the payments described herein in order to influence the 2016 presidential election. In so doing, he coordinated with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments. As a result of the payments solicited and made by COHEN, neither Woman-1 nor Woman-2 spoke to the press prior to the election.
In January 2017, COHEN in seeking reimbursement for election-related expenses, presented executives of the Company with a copy of a bank statement from the Essential Consultants bank account, which reflected the $130,000 payment COHEN had made to the bank account of Attorney-1 in order to keep Woman-2 silent in advance of the election, plus a $35 wire fee, adding, in handwriting, an additional “$50,000.” The $50,000 represented a claimed payment for “tech services,” which in fact related to work COHEN had solicited from a technology company during and in connection with the campaign. COHEN added these amounts to a sum of $180,035. After receiving this document, executives of the Company “grossed up” for tax purposes COHEN’s requested reimbursement of $180,000 to $360,000, and then added a bonus of $60,000 so that COHEN would be paid $420,000 in total. Executives of the Company also determined that the $420,000 would be paid to COHEN in monthly amounts of $35,000 over the course of 12 months, and that COHEN should send invoices for these payments.
On February 14, 2017, COHEN sent an executive of the Company (“Executive-1”) the first of his monthly invoices, requesting “[p]ursuant to [a] retainer agreement, . . . payment for services rendered for the months of January and February, 2017.” The invoice listed $35,000 for each of those two months. Executive-1 forwarded the invoice to another executive of the Company (“Executive-2”) the same day by email, and it was approved. Executive-1 forwarded that email to another employee at the Company, stating: “Please pay from the Trust. Post to legal expenses. Put ‘retainer for the months of January and February 2017’ in the description.”
Throughout 2017, COHEN sent to one or more representatives of the Company monthly invoices, which stated, “Pursuant to the retainer agreement, kindly remit payment for services rendered for” the relevant month in 2017, and sought $35,000 per month. The Company accounted for these payments as legal expenses. In truth and in fact, there was no such retainer agreement, and the monthly invoices COHEN submitted were not in connection with any legal services he had provided in 2017.
During 2017, pursuant to the invoices described above, COHEN received monthly $35,000 reimbursement checks, totaling $420,000.
Michael Cohen confessed to a crime he didn't commit given the facts at hand. People do this to avoid long sentences for possibly other crimes they committed. Michael Cohen is a convicted perjurer and was trying to avoid going to trial for tax fraud:
What I'm saying is there wasn't a factual dispute re: the campaign finance violations. Those acts were either a crime or they were not. I'm surprised people are complaining that wasn't something he could have been charged with but the judge signed off on it anyway. The more intangible things like mens rea doesn't really enter into it, IMO.
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
Sorry, why wouldn't it be a federal crime if it is considered violating federal election law for his campaign for a federal elected office?
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
Steelmanning: the FBI prosecutor made up a crime, an SDNY prosecutor carried water for this made up crime and charged Cohen with it, and Cohen plea bargained it and a judge validated the plea bargain and thusly this made up crime is now a real crime in this court and they charge Trump with it in the future, too.
Skeptically: I understand you give up your right to defend yourself when you plea bargain but does this mean a judge will let you confess to things that aren't crimes? Are you completely surrendering to the prosecutor's legal determination?
dr_analog
razorboy
5mo ago
Wasn't Michael Cohen charged and convicted for his part in this almost immediately, though? In 2018? The charge was referred by the special prosecutor's office, to a different NY DA, with the case allowed by a different judge?
Also, was it venue shopping? Wasn't Trump a resident of NY at the time, and didn't the crime happen in NY?
To steelman: actually, Trump didn't do anything illegal but due to multiple corrupt judges and multiple corrupt prosecutors they convicted Trump's attorney and Trump himself on what is a minor crime. All of this happening within one corrupt court, the SD of NY.
I view this lawfare as both morally wrong and deeply destabilizing.
Why is this lawfare? And why is it wrong? I can see both sides of the issue but want to make sure I'm not missing something.
Camp: this is terrible
This is a tragedy for justice. Trump did stuff that, sure it was technically illegal, but it took prosecutors like 5 years to charge him for this. The fact that it took so long is sus. The fact that it's during an election year is sus. Also, there are tons of people committing actual horrific felonies in NY that aren't being prosecuted. Additionally, it really seems like the prosecutor had to squint to find something to bust him with. This seems very politically motivated and like it sets a terrible precedent. It simply shows that you can prosecute any business leader for something if they infuriate the establishment enough. Additionally, you can't really read too much into this. He was charged and convicted in NY, a place that's full-on Trump Derangement Syndrome. He probably would've been sentenced to death for a parking ticket if the court allowed it. America is in danger.
for contrast
Camp: this is fine
This is a victory for justice. Even former Presidents are not above the law. He did a crime and he was convicted of it. He very much had a guilty mind, surrounding generally bad behavior, and did bad things while campaigning to be a leader of the country, one of the most important positions in the world. In the process of these morally bad acts he crossed a legal line and he's being called to account for it. Sure, it took a long time and sure it might have some twinge of political motivation to the timing, and this is a crime few people can really relate to, but you also want leaders held to a high standard and you also want them to be accountable. Juries may hate Trump but it's just implausible to expect even 12 New Yorkers to find him guilty of something just because they hate him. America has demonstrated its commitment to rule of law and we should celebrate.
I think your comment says you are uneasy about questions that require so much human interpretation and you are, rightfully, distrustful of authorities who demand a precise answer.
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